Spira Fantasy (FF10, FF10p2) Reviews

Both of these games I played on Playstation 2.
//______________________________________________________________________//
Review contents(Spira Fantasy I, Spira Fantasy II)
//Review contents(FFX, FFX-2)
//I played FF7-9 first.
//Also, I'm planning to finish playing FF3-6 eventually and then World of Final Fantasy.
//______________________________________________________________________//
Spira Fantasy; Final Fantasy ten; FFX.

Again a FF game with a solid musical soundtrack.
Graphics are a fantastic upgrade from the previous console FF games.
Unfortunately, the world building was a step in the wrong direction. This game heralds the beginning of a new era of a lack of creativity as moving about a world map is no longer possible. I personally found the globes in previous FF games helped dispel confusion and helped solidify story memories in my mind. Stagger Fantasy(FFXIII trilogy) also didn't have a globe, and all that datalog reading didn't really do enough to keep a player lucid about what's going on. Fortunately, Spira Fantasy I had a simple enough story that rarely was the player confused about what was going on. Rather, the side questing system lacked complexity.

Exploring is still a thing in this game, but it's laborious. Stagger Fantasy 2(FFXIII-2) eventually solved this problem by putting chocobos in most zones and allowing the main character to be very friendly towards all animals so that even monsters can be tamed and of course many chocobos can be ridden by her. Also, in that game there was no need to wait for an airship to be acquired to move from zone to zone as it used a portal system. I get that the developers want players to relax a lot more and just enjoy the show, but games are meant to be interactive.

The game had some 'puzzles in a dungeon' that many older RPGs had and that was a fun twist that I enjoyed. The default white mage was the main party's only summoner and so had to visit every temple, so we would solve the puzzles to gain access to the new summoning capability. I liked the puzzles in Stagger Fantasy 2 more, but these were pretty cool also. FF7 and FF8 had some puzzles here or there, and they were generally for side quests. IIRC, the Stagger Fantasy 2 puzzles are introduced in the mandatory section of the story, while the more difficult puzzles are part of optional parts of the story. In Spira Fantasy 1 however, the puzzles are for the most part a mandatory part of the story. True, 100 percent completion of a puzzle was necessary to get some hidden item, but it doesn't take away from the fact that the puzzle itself was mandatory. Not everyone likes puzzles, so this might not have been the best way to give us these puzzles. Perhaps there should have been puzzles barring the way to unlock the ultimate/celestial weapons. And I'm not sure dodging lots of lightning bolts really qualifies as a puzzle. Was definitely more of an exercise than anything else. I did that lightning bolt challenge. It was certainly not too annoying IMO unlike the jump rope exercise in FF9. I did not do the jump rope challenge. I'm not that obsessive about exercise.

Spira Fantasy brought players the Monster Arena. A scientist is met that wants to use a property for working on monsters. He asks the protagonists to clear out the property so that it's safe for his activity. After they comply, he'll ask them to start capturing monsters and bring them to him so that he can experiment on them as well as make original creations. Special capturing weapons must be used, and such may be purchased from the scientist himself. Various rewards are gaind from battling the monsters, and it's basically an area to test your characters' new battle prowess. It basically holds a monopoly on the post-game progression. Keep in mind that I have not played the International version. I don't really know how the process of taking on that games' superbosses works, as defeating all of the original creations of the Monster Arena scientist is difficult enough. I actually bought a disc for the international version, but it was scratched and I couldn't get to see Wakka or Rikku yet.

The story in this game is not bad, but it's easy to forget about it because the story progression and battle progression are not linked appropriately. While the game does a fine job of getting players out of the tutorial quickly, it continues to not present any meaningful challenges or interesting side quests until a large majority of the story is out of the way. This makes it easier for players to simply forget about the story, and without any sort of new game plus option, battle progression will be lost when starting a new game which probably won't feel that great to experience for example, what if you want to visit the Monster Arena all over again? Well guess what, now you have to capture them all over again. Stagger Fantasy 3 solved this problem marvelously with its new game plus system which offers a hard mode, and in all difficulty modes, almost all enemies are stronger depending on which day of the story the battle is happening on. Adding this sort of functionality to Final Fantasy 10 would make it a much better game. Adding features from older/newer games to existing games is something I don't see the company doing and I don't understand why they don't do it. They experimented with making monsters stronger as the main characters get stronger in FF8, but they didn't actually revisit the idea 2 games later. Imagine being able to start a new game plus with the capturing weapons already equipped. We would not have to backtrack to finish completing the Monster Arena quotas. Just play through the story as normal. How awesome that would have been!

The character development was average. They can eventually travel the entire sphere grid which can dilute some of the individuality between the characters. But players are unlikely to be overleveling their characters for completing the game's story.

This game still has a nice battle system. It just lacks particularly interesting battles for the most part. It's solid as a role playing game, it just doesn't feel like the good old Final Fantasy games anymore. And that's okay. Of course, it still keeps some things the same. There are still enemies stronger than final boss, still ultimate weapons for the main characters, and so on.
An interesting aspect of the combat system that hasn't been seen in future FF games which is a disappointment to me that I haven't seen more of it is the ability to continually switch characters in battle. Three characters battle, and if the enemies are difficult for any of them to deal with, they can switch places with a 'benched character' and watch someone else do something. Changing the weapon or armor is an action that is helpful, although unlike in FF2,  doing so will cost them a little bit of battle time to do. The game also featured the ability to customize the equipment. I really liked this feature.
The summoning system is different. Not here is the summoning 'a flashy spell that is cast that does damage or whatever' but instead it's a call by the default white mage to battle as a replacement for the main battle party.
The limit break system is really interesting in this game. The limit breaks are called overdrives and the conditions to activate them can change depending on which overdrive mode the player is using. Different overdrive modes can be unlocked which adds an extra thing for players to think about and be able to customize. I like that and wish they kept using this feature in later games.
//______________________________________________________________________//
Spira Fantasy 2; Final Fantasy ten, part 2; FFX-2.

This game had music that was mostly fast-paced which was a nice deviation from traditional FF games' soundtracks. There were some absolutely horrible songs though.
Has a battle system restricting the players to only 3 characters, however they may change their jobs during battle.
The job changing is not without limitations as what job can be switched to is determined by which dress spheres are inserted where on their garment grid.
Each character may equip a different garment grid or the same one, which is odd.

The airship is acquired from the beginning of the game, but players don't get to control it in the same way airships were traditionally controlled in FF games. This is the primary reason I call the series Spira Fantasy intead of Final Fantasy ten. I miss the old style of exploration a lot.
Most, if not all treasure chests replenish every chapter, so if playing blind we're going to be doing a lot of unnecessary treasure chest opening, maybe OCD excuses it.
Has side quests that are a lot more memorable and interesting than the first Spira Fantasy's side quests.
The battle system went back to the ATB system whereas the previous game was using something else.

The 100 percent completion is a strange feature that doesn't work that well. Bonus footage after credits as a reward and that's about it. There is also a bonus footage ending in Stagger Fantasy 2. However, here there are some odd requirements for getting it, no tangible resource to harvest the maximum amount of.
To top it off, some of the story progression can get a little bit aggravating while playing it blind. It's not a big deal because if stuck on it a player can opt to wander around and get some level ups, but it's still worth noting. Also there are ways to accomplish side quests that seems a bit nonsensical. I have to admit I followed guides to a do a lot of stuff in this game because there's so much we can or can't do and only excessive experimentation can prove things one way or the other unless already documented. So I prefer to consult others' documents, although sparingly.
The NPCs block off a lot of things. There is a lot of working together to get things done, but it's pretty silly when the difference between an entire gang hanging out on a mountain is whether or not you talked to a village elder to get information. Logically, they would be there whether or not the NPC nearby tells players, but the presence of the opponents is coded to require the conversation. Knowing which NPCs Yuna needs to talk to in order to move the story along is not always clear. There are also sequences of scenes that don't make very much sense. Such as NPCs walking outside of a building, and then when Yuna walks in, those same NPCs happen to be inside already. Not a lot of logic quality testing was done, clearly.

The jobs in general had good flavor and it was very interesting to see how the 3 different characters would look when doing those jobs. This kind of thing shows up in Lightning Returns as well, but it's mostly a passing familiarity, can't really call it the same combat system just on these similiarities. It's another game I wouldn't mind seeing the combat system make a reappearance in a future game, but I can see how game developers would be hesitant to try this as it requires a lot of work from the artists to add it to the game.
The 3 main characters are individualized in combat a bit by exceptional jobs granting them some different abilities. Player decision making can also make a difference, ability learning order can be controlled, although abilities still have a tech tree of sorts.

What is a limit break in this game? I would guess the closest thing this game has to a limit break is the garment grids. They have these 'barriers' on them that can be passed while changing jobs and when enough of these barriers are passed through, either a Special Dress Sphere may be changed into, or various benefits will be obtained for the duration of the battle. There are also various accessories that function as some sort of strange limit break. Catnip is similar to lucky 7s trigger and FFVIII's limit break system, Bloodlust is a stronger form of Red XIII's Howling Moon or one of Vincent's transformations. There are also some job abilities that function like limit breaks, Warrior's Assault, Psychicker's(International/HD) Telekinesis is like a Blue Magic from FFVIII, and there's probably more that I forgot about, will have to consult with other FFX-2 players and/or play it some more again to figure out which things they are.

[strikeout]I haven't played through all the older FF games yet, but for all the controversial stuff in this game, I feel like they did good work on the job system. Going to update this review some more after I play FF3 and FF5.[/strikeout]
Now that I have completed FF3 and FF5, I mentioned I would update this title so here goes something. Comparing this to previous entries is rather interesting because it's a bit of a blend of the old job systems with what we get to see in FF13, but it's very unique in its own way. I think I preferred Bravely Default 2 as a game in many ways over this game but the idea of spontaneous job shifting is pretty interesting in its own way that isn't used much.

I guess if they wanted to revisit this concept they could do it again with World of Final Fantasy 2, a sequel that doesn't exist yet, they could give the players 3 stacks(perhaps with 1-3 stacks on standby?) and then let the stacks shuffle around during battle to achieve different results. Just a thought. In any case, being able to change your jobs during battle was very interesting and did sort of mimic the ability to swap in different characters during battle that FFX had. But instead of different characters entirely, you had different outfits.

In FF3, your characters could only change jobs outside of battle, and in FF5 it was basically the same, except as I recall, in FF5 your characters could have a partial secondary job, a little bit like what we get in Bravely Default 2. I don't necessarily like or dislike this, but what I have noticed is the extra job makes your characters more flexible. There was actually some rare jobs in FF5 that let you sacrifice attack and/or item as commands in order to add even more job commands to your character equipping that job. The game also had much more clear ways to challenge superbosses like FF7 OG did, whereas in Spira Fantasy 2, you had to go through a variety of NPC conversations and quests to get the right to challenge the superbosses. Also in FF3, the 'superbosses' were just rare random encounters in the final dungeon that you could simply run away from which was an interesting way to handle it. I missed defeating one of them because it didn't come for me in the random encounters, so I didn't know it existed. But I decided the experience was good enough as was and moved on. FF3 also had the most endurance testing final dungeon section of any of these 3 games, and moreso than Bravely Default 2 of course. There were no save points except for just before the section, and you had to go through multiple dungeons without a single save to get to the end.

To be clear, I played the 3D remake version on Steam of FF3 which I'm sure is very different from PR(to be honest, I recommend you play every game on PR if you wanted to play all of them, but that's just a general recommendation that doesn't necessarily apply to everyone, you can for example play PR versions of games with challenge rules(such as no buying stuff in shops) to make the experience more fun). One thing I learned about PR is it even gives you the ability to buy phoenix downs for your characters. FF3 didn't have a single shop in the game selling those, and it wasn't a common monster drop whatsoever, so you had to be careful about how often you used those. Overall I think despite its lack of expansiveness and innovation, FF3's game design was vastly superior to FF5's and it was at least a little bit better than Spira Fantasy 2 to play in my mind if your main concern with gameplay is fairness. FF5(I played Pixel Remaster version) was extremely unfair for a lot of reasons, and although Spira Fantasy 2 wasn't exactly hard, having to follow extremely specific instructions to finish various side quests was really obnoxious so if you're a completionist, you might struggle to think of that game as fair, like many other games where completing 100 percent is no easy task unless you ask for help. But I think most people agree that it is perfectly fine for optional content to be generally quite difficult. Still, sometimes I think there is no puzzle to be solved when it's literally just something that functionally feels more like a password than a solution to a problem.

In any case, completing Spira Fantasy 2's main story is significantly easier than doing so for FF3 or FF5, so if you like a challenge, you may want to look to games that handle the optional stuff better than Spira Fantasy 1 and 2 did. In any case, I think FF series entered a dark age after FF1, with maybe one game between 2-6 standing out as the best for each player(in my case it's FF3) and the rest being trash. They seemed to improve just about everything with FF7 onward for the most part. Many of these newer games including FF7 and the Spira Fantasy may be considered too easy, but if you enjoy a challenge you can usually figure out how to unlock superboss battles without too much trouble. After this, they started added MMORPGs to their flagship series, which was an odd choice.